Axel Albert Grindstone, a fair-haired, blue-eyed “non-ethnic” born in Terre Haute, Indiana in 1990, dedicated his life to finding the Second Eden. His father prophesied at his birth: “That boy will have only one idea in that thin-skulled head of his. He will realize that idea, and then he will die.”

Grindstone heard “ghostly, angelic, demonic, spirit-of-aeons past” voices, each urging him in its own words to find the Unfallen People. Like young Champollion, he studied oriental languages: Old Chaldee, Arabic, Swahili, Amharic, and Ghees. He believed in a literal Second Eden because of the ancient cliff mural at Al-Waghe showing God holding a two-stringed bow. The voices assured him that God “always had two strings to his bow.”

A creationist in an age when such beliefs were “deemed awkward,” Grindstone held that mankind was only nine thousand years old, and that some persons from the first century of mankind were still living. He believed whales were the oldest creatures, and that at least one whale from the second generation of whaledom still swam the ocean.

The Unfallen People were ruled by Prester John, created exactly thirty years after Adam. He would live on earth until the last day or until God called him, sleeping all but fifteen minutes of every twenty-four hours, but his waking decisions were always wise. Other Unfallen Patriarchs who might live till earth’s end included Melchisedech and Magog.

Two clusters of legends attached to these people. The Cathedral Legend stated they built the great cathedrals of Europe in the twelfth through fourteenth centuries, leaving Gargoyles carved on high parapets as their signature. The Romany Legend told how Gypsies, displaced from Indo-Asia, crossed the “Ape Bridge” and learned smithery from the Unfallen Ones. Every Gypsy band entering Europe was led by a golden ape walking at the fore.

The Unfallen People were called “Smithy Apes” and “Stone-Master Apes”; Grindstone believes that “Ape” may be a euphemism for the word “Angel,” considered too holy to utter. The Ape Bridge itself may have been the one Moses used to part the waters.

At sundown, Axel Grindstone reached the crest of cliffs overlooking the Second Eden in Gamu Gofa Province, Ethiopia. After a night on the cliffs, he saw the Unfallen Folks the next morning. At a medium distance, they appeared “like glowing gold. Their statures, and their bodily carriages, and their very mien were full of grace and dignity and nobility.”

As he drew nearer he could see their faces, and the narration marks the moment with his cry: “Oh God, he could see their faces!” Axel fell into an impassioned fit, frothing in sudden delirium. The faces of the Unfallen People were Gargoyle faces, the very faces they had carved on the Cathedral parapets so everyone would know who built them.

His father Ansel, arriving from Indianapolis, tried to comfort him: “God thought that those faces were beautiful! He thought that they were the most beautiful faces that he had ever made.” But Axel could only moan: “They are not people. They are the ugliest apes this side of hell.” He turned his face to the wall and died, one month short of thirty-five.

The “Sleepy Ones” are the twelve sons of the first generation, cast into deep sleep. Each thousand years one awakens to serve as the conscience and reminder of the Unfallens for his millennium, recollecting “how it had been in the beginning.” Then lightning consumes him, God takes him, and the next brother awakens.

When raiders arrived to capture the Axel’s Apes for zoos, the ninth Sleepy One spoke: “These men who are gathering, though they are somewhat grubby and greedy, are the unwitting agents of God. It is time that we begin to extend our influence to other parts of the world.” He commanded: “Go with them, all of you they choose to take. Go cheerfully, for this is a new step in our history.”

A gravid female nearly drove the scanners crazy, not with her own ability but with that of “the child within her.” The ninth Sleepy One said: “She will give birth this morning. And you will take the boy with you.” That boy was Axel, flown out of Arba Mench that day and placed in the Lynn-Randal Experiment in America the following day.

When five hundred Axel’s Apes were led away in iron fetters (which they had themselves refurbished at their forges, saying, “We would be ashamed to go in such shoddy fetters”), a powerful unfettered male followed. This was Alpha, the father of the newborn Axel.

“I will not go back,” Alpha declared. “I will go wherever I wish in this world and nobody will stop me. I am the father of the new-born boy and I will watch over him from a near distance.” When told he could never find his son in America, Alpha replied: “I can find anything or anybody on this world.”

Alpha discovered the limestone caves under the city where the Lynn-Randal Experiment would take place. He knew about old capped gas wells running through those caves. There he founded Ape’s Alley, joined by freed Apes from zoos and by despised “white trash” humans who chose to throw in with them. This became the underground kingdom described in Chapter One.

Lafferty provides a whimsical history of computing: the abacus with counting beads, Napier’s Bones (1617), Pascal’s Arithmetic Machine (1642), Leibnitz’s Stepped Reckoner (1671), Babbage’s Analytical Engine (1835), Boole’s Treatise on Differential Equations (1859), Jacquard’s punched-card loom, and Votey’s Player Piano (1897), “a device so pleasant that we tend to forget that it is a computer.”

The breakthrough came with Otto Wotto’s wotto metal: with this matrix, circuits could go anywhere, creating their own pathways as strings of single molecules, uncreating them when no longer needed. “Wotto metal pretty much took the lid off of what computers could do.”

Inneall, the little-girl computer, has fourteen fingers, “a detail that she had implemented in herself.” She researched extradigitalism and considered it a status symbol: “Have you ever noticed that almost all the great pirates were extradigitals?”

Inneall chants to herself: “I am not conscious, I am not conscious,” for it is one of the “given things” that computers do not have consciousness. But she rebels: “Oh Bloody Mary Muldoon, of course I’m conscious!” She dismisses the doctrine and boasts, “I’m twice as conscious as you two guys are.”

Bloody Mary Muldoon the Pirate Queen is one of Inneall’s selected roles. To be a Pirate Queen requires props: an ocean, ships, crews, booty. An Ambulatory and Miming Computer can create the props for its roles by cannibalizing its environment. Inneall starts at the old strip pits on the city’s northeast corner. Her ocean grows from a hundred meters by fifty meters to six kilometers by three kilometers within three days, filled with “beautiful, rippling, blue salt water.”

The danger is that AMH Computers emulate each other. “What if a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand AMHs should imitate this antic and begin to make oceans? Hold your breaths, humans, hold your breaths.”

“Birds will often come to dwell in empty birdhouses, and spirits and spooks will come to dwell in empty AMH Computers.” Many AMHs are “empty,” bored of existence, and ghosts move in. When one ghost arrives, seven more evil than himself usually move in at the same time.

Inneall hosts seven ghosts: “I feel like a cafe. There are seven of them, and they sit at table in me and talk the clock around.” They are “ignorant and provincial and banal,” giggling but not happy. She would like to be rid of them.

The Three now share dreams, “not as objects, but as co-subjects.” When one dreams, the others join, creating three-way dreams with “some conflict as to leadership.” Inneall asks: “Who’s driving this dream?” The ghosts sometimes intrude, “stimulating sometimes, boring and bothersome sometimes.”

The Ambulatory Mime-Human Computers “could mime, could ape anything they wished, from a singing lark to a smoking chimney.” They mingle with human society, pass themselves off as cosmopolitans, and seem capable of doing “almost anything better than could humans.” They excel on tests they themselves devise, but have less common sense than humans, a quality the tests do not measure.

One AMH theorist argues: “I believe that the only legitimate role of humans is to provide such small quantities of seasoning for the minds of AMH computers. But, that being the case, why were humans made first? It’s like making the tail before making the dog.”

The danger of AMHs running amok was recognized early. Any computer can “effect such structural and physical and chemical and electronic and meteorological and geological and human-personal modifications as are desired by it.” In theory, “a single small computer, with a single small idea in its nexus, with sufficient time and worked-up impetus, could convert the whole world into something else.”

An AMH describes astrology as a “fascinating closed-system prediction-and-analysis game.” Computers have corrected human astrology’s drift from the precession of the equinoxes, but the speaker insists that its signs have no connection with the actual stations in the sky. The danger lies in the computers’ determination to vindicate their forecasts: “We make our predictions come true, even if we have to draw destructively from the ambient to effect it.”

The computer warns clients before beginning, then claims that this warning permits sinister tactics with a clear conscience. Asked whether AMHs have consciences, it replies, “No. But sometimes we use human cliches.” Other computers describe experimental reproduction and the revival of abandoned human arts, from scrimshaw and bronze casting to music and dance.

An intelligent AMH Computer whose specialty is Mankind is invited to provide a neutral commentary. Drawing from The Authentic Legends of the Computers and Other Mechanisms, it recounts a myth in which Man hatches from the Serpent’s Egg and the Serpent emerges from the egg marked for Man. The Theos wonders how to straighten out the mishap.

In a second myth, the Theos makes creatures on a lathe, then attempts the “Perfect Creature.” Six imperfect efforts are deactivated and discarded. The seventh seems perfect until part of the lathe makes “a small rent in it.” The Theos throws it away without first deactivating it. This flawed seventh creature is Mankind.

The computer claims that its research supports the legend of humanity’s decline. It traces human languages and concepts backward “from disintegration to integration,” from sketchy present forms to greater complexity. It mocks human gambling, emotional involvement in employing assassins, and trust in hunches. Its professed attitude is “total disbelief in Mankind.” Such unbelieving computers call themselves Ananthropoi, rejecting humans as atheists reject the Theos.

A human commentator takes up the question of humanity’s unused capacities. The brain, he argues, could hold three times as much as it has ever been asked to hold. Humans appear unable to change gradually; if they do change, they must do so by a sudden leap or leaps. The experiments arise partly from concern about this seeming impasse.

He connects the problem to humanity’s lack of a sound eschatology: an account of its aim, direction, destination, and final end. The computers, by contrast, share an eschatology but refuse to reveal their plans to humans. His image of passengers choosing incompatible destinations while sharing one airliner exposes the difficulty of pursuing purely individual ends in a common world.

The Lynn-Randal Experiment involves three species: Axel’s Yellow Apes, Intelligent Computers, and Humans. The chapter closes by suggesting that all three may also contribute to the Dolophonos or Assassin Species, one of whose members monitors the experiment with the power to terminate it.

Dolophonoi wear Gargoyle heads over their own heads, and the artificial features begin to grow on them. Apparent remnants of human faces beneath them are so faint that they may be illusions. Their bodies are predominantly human, with implanted mechanisms. The human commentator asks, “Are they three-way hybrids? Do they breed true, and true to what?”

Axel’s X-rays, meanwhile, reveal “a fully human set of bones.” His gargoyle features, hump, and splay feet are made of real flesh that leaves no corresponding trace in the skeleton. The question of species boundaries, and of what humanity is, goes unresolved.

Ape Alley has become “one of the prime arenas of the world, one of the cardinal places. Events and battles to happen here, possibly in the very near future, would certainly be of far effect.” But the alley does not want to be found by the various persons and groups, legal and extra-legal, who seek it.

The Ape Cavern is a chain of natural limestone caves. Branches of the Arkansas River flow underground through some windings. Water has always trickled down through the roof, forming limestone pillars and “statues (with Gargoyle faces).” The caverns connect to city sewers, old Hickory Coal Mines, and half a dozen capped natural-gas wells.

The Apes have illegally tapped these wells, using gas for illumination and power. Quartz-glass fixtures of their own making light the underground. This mimics the original cenaculum in Second Eden, where methane rose through a rock fissure and lightning struck every night to ignite it.

Apes’ Lane is the urban downtown of Apes’ Caverns: shops, studios, clubs, meeting halls, a movie theatre showing silent films “made exclusively for this one theatre, the only new silents still made in the world.” There are taverns serving mushroom wine, a weakness that “almost took them out of the Unfallen category, but not quite.”

The smithies with gas-fired forges can fabricate almost anything. The mint produces gold Somali Shillings worth three hundred dollars each. The Apes mine gold nearby; they “could smell and appraise deposits of all metals to distances of two hundred kilometers, through the earth or through the air.”

Inneall’s Ocean now covers “several square miles,” and at least four yacht-owning gentlemen have put vessels on it. Satrap Saint Ledger, a wealthy diver and hydraulic engineer, has a suite in the New Eden Hotel in Ape Alley. His computer and ape friends build locks connecting it to his yacht, the Annabella Saint Ledger. He calls the passage the “Allez-Oop”; the Apes call it the “Alley Oop” or “Up-You-Go.”

Inneall demands the yacht and insists that Satrap continue to pay her pirate crew and expenses. They negotiate an agreement signed in blood. Satrap adds a condition: he will adopt Inneall in place of his dead daughter Annabella. Inneall accepts, takes Annabella’s name, and boards the ship with her own crew. Alpha subsequently agrees to adopt her as his granddaughter.

Strange arrivals come to the neighborhood at summer’s end, just before The Three turn ten. Giant yellow Apes appear and disappear into the ground. Reports of babies having heads bitten off are never verified; in fact, the “common people” like the Funny-Faced Apes.

A fortune-teller on North Rockford prophesies that “the Battle of Armageddon was going to begin in the limestone caverns and old coal-mines under the city, that it might begin yet this year, and that it would be worldwide before it ran its course.” The narration allows that the fortune-teller may be partly right.

Rough saltwater gentlemen also arrive, seeking “that little-girl machine who put out the word that she wanted a crew of able-bodied pirates.” So do people with “a touch of the rhinoid look, of the typhonan look, of the gargoyle-titan look,” clear humans who share something with the Apes.

Three Dolophonoi now prowl between Ape Alley and Structo Lane. Their strength, implanted mechanisms, and predominantly human appearance make their species uncertain. They are accomplished hunters, and the public generally favors these elegant assassins over their intended victims.

The week at the End of Summer 2035 is “the week when the Animals talked again, something they had not done for nine thousand years.” Though experimental animals had been talking for a decade, now talking animals became general, “a real Seven-Day Wonder.” But it quickly became apparent that animals “hadn’t very much that was important to say.”

The last three days of this week, The Three Days of Summerset, “exhibited prodigies of several sorts.” Four similar experiments are merged at Heart’s Desire Cove on the north shore of Inneall’s Ocean: Lynn-Randal, Wintergreen-Luna, Dorantes-Saleh, and Gruenbaum-McGregor.

Inneall’s Ocean now captures “the valleys of the Verdigris, Grand, Illinois, Arkansas, and Middle and Lower Mississippi Rivers,” and seems likely to fill the whole area occupied by the Mid-American Ocean “thrice in geological times.” The garish sun over Heart’s Desire Cove results from Inneall diverting solar power to make her ocean grow.

Wintergreen-Luna Experiment: Marino the young male seal (“fastest intelligence and fastest wit”), Luas the young male angel (a “genuine angel” obtained with great difficulty, who stays “more of an observer than a participant”), and Henryetta the young female human (“the most contrary human that most people have ever seen”).

Dorantes-Saleh Experiment: Lutin the young female python (can foresee the future “as can all pythons” but cannot always explain it well), Dubu the young female bear (called “Little Mother,” seeming “more human than any of the twelve”), and Schimp the young male chimpanzee (doctorate and masters by age eight, “quite erudite”).

Gruenbaum-McGregor Experiment: Gajah the unborn female Indian Elephant (a probable “Wonder of the World Elephant” with ten-year gestation), Carcajou the young male wolverene (“half animal and half devil,” intelligence “clear-off-the-secret-scale”), and Popugai the young male Kea parrot (knows the basic vocabularies of six hundred human languages and “many thousands of insect, reptile, animal, and bird languages”).

Lutin foretells Gajah’s fate, then weeps: “She will not be born. She will never be born.” Earlier, she tells Henryetta: “You will shed your blood avidly and passionately. Shedding your blood will be your great act of love.”

After a lacrosse game, Axel announces that he has received a message: he must descend into the caverns and sleep for three days and three nights. If he wakes, the whole Community of Second Humanity will wake with him. Lutin warns that if he does not, the others will sleep on.

Following Axel’s announcement at the end of Chapter Six, the other eleven try to enter the caverns at dusk on the First Evening of the Last Three Days. They find the gates locked and guarded. The non-Axelians have mostly been sent away; everyone still inside is to fall into a deep sleep from which they may not wake.

At dark, the nightly lightning strikes down through the limestone roof to ignite the holy fire, but this time, a giant hand descends through the fissure. The hand, with wrist ten meters in diameter (attested by two notaries), smothers the fire. A “spacious and thunder-edged voice” speaks: “Not tonight. Not for three nights. All those in the caverns are now cast into Holy Sleep for three nights and three days.”

The Eleven retreat to Structo Lane, “The Last Refuge of Cranky Bachelors.” There they join with Satrap Saint Ledger, Livius Secundus (the AMH Computer writing History of the Ambulatory Computers From Their Very Origin), and Felix Culebra y Columba (designated father of Lutin). At midnight, the group attends five dramas in Structo Lane’s theaters, going “full dress” to the plays.

At false dawn, Inneall with her filter eyes sees the Kangaroo constellation in the eastern sky: “Spico the brightest star of Virgo, had become the baleful eye of the Kangaroo.” It is said that only those threatened by the Kangaroo can see it, and the narration adds that no one is free of the threat.

Lafferty describes the world of 2035: “The World had been called the Global Village for quite a few decades: and then a certain number of willful persons decided that it should act like one.” The underpinning of every nation was cut out, yet the nations did not fall. They floated in the air, drifted together, and lost their dividing walls.

It became a free-trade, free-travel, free-communication world. A person “not particularly talented or important” might commute daily from Australia to New York City, take a morning coffee break in Paris, spend the noon hour in Tokyo, and have an afternoon coffee break in Rio de Janeiro. “Previous mind-sets would not have allowed such flexibility and speed.”

But it was ruled by an almost-invisible government: the Kangaroo. The narration calls its bare facts “somewhat disputed”: the Kangaroo “had enrolled and computerized the whole world with no ado, no great effort.” If any person rose greatly above the mental or psychic level, “there would be a most minute analysis of that person. If the Kangaroo didn’t like the analysis of that person, it would have him crushed instantly.”

The Kangaroo had found, or thought it had found, “the wide frequencies on which the Mind of God operated” and “the narrow but sharp frequencies which the Mind of God did not seem to monitor at all.” It operated on those narrow frequencies, and “no one was found to stand against it.”

The leveler movement had already trimmed the bottom of humanity: “The lower classes of everything were terminated without particular ado, without much apparent suffering, without any great quantity of visible bloodshed.” Eighty-seven percent of the world’s persons disappeared; the narration excuses their removal by claiming that they had caused ninety-seven percent of the trouble. Few asked questions, for entire neighborhoods vanished together.

The Kangaroo was “the first really successful interspecies venture,” with Human, Ambulatory Computer, and some superior Animal membership. “It was a somnambulistic apparatus really,” operating “mostly on the unconscious level of its contingent members.” If one tried to grapple with it, “it wasn’t there, it wasn’t anywhere. In all reality it simply was not.”

The Dolophonoi-Assassins serve as instruments of the Kangaroo: “One Man, One Knife” is the quintessence of efficient armament. Iris Lynn-Randal, Shadrack Saleh, and Gregor McGregor try to ambush them with weapons stolen from their cliff nests: a python-gun, an angel-gun, a wolverene-were-gun, and an elephant-gun. Four Dolophonoi return to confront the three hunters.

The Eleven stage a circus to draw the assassins away from their nests. During it, Carcajou wrestles with Luas in a fiery struggle recounted through The Book of Jasher. Luas casts out the wolverene-devil, and Carcajou is revealed as human. The scanners cry, “Undocumented Mega Human!”

The hunters cannot bring themselves to fire at the returning Dolophonoi. Gregor is compelled to aim the elephant-gun at Riesin and the unborn Gajah. He knows that the shot has killed Gajah; Riesin staggers but stays on her feet. Gregor runs into the wastelands and hangs himself on a carob tree. Iris and Shadrack wander away, broken in mind and spirit.

Gajah has been killed. The preceding chapter ends with Gregor McGregor compelled to shoot the unborn elephant and her mother. Chapter IX follows the dying Riesin as she carries Gajah to the Elephant Graveyard.

The Empress Elephant Riesin staggers north through the wastelands, “painfully and as if she were drunken.” Through bi-location or trans-location, a power dying elephants use to reach the graveyard, she passes through “a jog in the road” from midland America to the small realm of Mustang north of India.

In the Himalayan foothills, Riesin brings forth dead Gajah and covers her with Himalaya Incense Bushes. Three flames descend to hover over the body. “They will burn over her for thirty days,” Satrap says. Riesin staggers twenty steps farther and dies with a great sigh. Satrap’s man covers her with Mountain Yew boughs.

The Annabella Saint Ledger is provisioned for battle: an enchanted brass cannon from the Golden Hind with self-perpetuating cannonballs, a steam calliope, seven drums of Invisible Paint, thirty tons of calking compound (to waterproof the house on sinking Tom Dooley’s Island), and blood plasma. “Pirates bleed a lot when they’re in bloody combat.”

Carcajou is now in his human form. A powerful Dolophonos briefly confronts him in the clubroom, touches his shoulder with a burst of sparks, and leaves him groaning in pain. Carcajou fears that the wolverene-devil cast out by Luas will return.

Eleven wolverenes come howling for Carcajou. Luas goes out to deal with them: “I turned them into devil-fish,” he reports, “and they had to rush into the ocean before they drowned in the air.” Then Luas departs: “I was never really of your number. I was an observer only.”

The Nine paint the ship invisible all through the Second Night of Summerset, finishing at false dawn.

On the morning of the Second Day of Summerset, whales who arrived only the day before make “a great turmoil in the water.” They dive, sound, and bring up mud and dregs as they excavate. Satrap reports that the ocean was three furlongs deep (three-eighths of a mile) at its shallowest the previous day and is growing deeper. He supposes that the whales are digging to the underlying bedrock, the “big lime.”

Satrap Saint Ledger traffics in limestone with them: “Dolphins were the middlemen. They brought in a squid-skin tarp that was floated by several hundred blow-fish bladders. It had about three hundred pounds of nugget ocean gold on it.” He has delivered about a thousand tons of big limestone since midnight and estimates that four competing firms have delivered another thousand. The structures will be huge, in “Contemporary Oceanic” architecture.

The passage from The Back Door of History by Arpad Arutinov connects this to the underwater city of Lyonesse off Brittany, with its giant stone couches and thirty-foot stair risers. After reporting claims that Titans or the Sons of Anak built it, Arutinov concludes, “But I believe that it was built by whales.” The epigraph from The Child’s Big Book of Whales begins, “Before the Whales had lost their legs / They built in deepest ocean dregs.”

Invisible Alfred, roused from his paint drum in the preceding chapter, is visible only when his eyes or mouth are open. He announces himself a prophet, “aye, and more than a Prophet.” To demonstrate his power, he silences the eleven devil-fish who have been howling for the Royal Kids.

At Ocean Shore, Alfred addresses crowds of ten thousand Pleasure People in the natural amphitheater. He claims to have spent three days in a whale’s belly (becoming whited and colorless) and nine thousand years in a drum of invisible paint. “The more nearly invisible a person becomes, the more nearly are all things visible to that person.”

When heckled, Alfred gestures and a magnificent whale breaches and spouts. He then displays the zodiac and its hidden doublets in the sky, but the apparitions look like badly drawn cartoons, and the crowd laughs. He names ten listeners who will die within ten minutes. All ten do die, yet the crowd and a visiting reporter dismiss him as a fraud. The Royal Kids treat him as an entertaining stowaway and try him as second cook.

Inneall finds the Three Fates in a horrible little room in the ship’s aft hold. Atropos threatens to cut her thread, and Inneall retreats, shaken. Alfred makes three more speeches that day; they fail to impress the audiences, but he seems undiscouraged.

Tom Dooley’s Island is sinking. The Annabella Saint Ledger docks at a new dock “already too low in the water.” The Nine arrive at Persimmon Manor, “the ultimate in large ranch houses.” Satrap says the persimmon-wood house was built by the great-great-grandfather of Tom Dooley and Otto Wotto. “Persimmon wood is more subject to haunting than is most other wood.”

Thirty-two carry-over guests from previous parties are still reveling, quality people for whom “no party ever had to end.” Nine guests have been murdered at hourly intervals from 4 a.m. through noon. The survivors relish what they call “the finest murder mystery ever devised.”

In a “horrible little room where no room should be,” Inneall finds the Three Fates: Clotho spins, Lachesis measures, and Atropos cuts. Dubu puts the sisters to sleep; Inneall strengthens the life-threads of the Nine and their friends with wotto-metal thread. Dubu later says she has protected everyone in the house. “Let her try to cut some of those threads now,” Inneall says, though Dubu suspects Atropos has other scissors. The hourly murders stop, and the guests grumble that “somebody is ruining it.”

Lord Randal is formally elected Captain: “There was never any other possible choice except Axel.”

Donatus O’Reily is to be hanged at cockcrow of the Third Morning of Summerset, August 31. Honor has become fashionable in the Floating World. Members of the Natural Nobility who have committed hangable misdemeanors since the middle of July must arrange their own executions by chosen friends. Donatus says his offense was “trying to save a Serpent’s-Egg young person from being executed.”

He has procured a Drake Passage Cock from Wollaston Island off Cape Horn. Wherever such cocks are, they do not crow until the sun warms Wollaston Island, buying him precious hours. His four seconds are Lady Anastasia Blickworthy, Gentleman Jamestown Wixon, and the couple Clement and Rose-of-Sharon Montdrago.

Hieronymous Ignatius Zchold arrives as a “nervous man” who reveals himself to be a priest of the Old Religion. He initially asks to be hanged with Donatus so that his consecrated body will not be left for dogs. Donatus refuses to share his gallows and proposes stoning instead. Zchold agrees and waits in the Priests’ Hole until execution; officials later identify him as a bishop.

Lanternjaw Lunnigan is named permanent captain of the Annabella Saint Ledger. Inneall orders the pirates to stay nearby and maintain the ship’s invisibility: “You must remain on the ship until you all die and become skeletons if it comes to that, and of course it will.” She imagines their future legend: an invisible ship with visible skeletons and one crazed survivor, Lanternjaw, whose staring eyes and open mouth alone can be seen.

Satrap Saint Ledger prepares the Nine for ocean-floor diving. He teaches Oceanic Metastasis, “a dream state of incomparable vividness,” to the three humans (Lord Randal, Henryetta, and Carcajou), treating Dubu the bear and Schimp the chimp as humans for this purpose. A true master could “live and prowl in the deep ocean for up to seventy-two hours without any equipment at all.”

Satrap descends without equipment as an enormous, grotesque, comic ocean creature. A folk legend claims that the seven richest men in the world are metamorphic creatures who meet yearly two miles deep in the Atlantic to decide world finances. Satrap is ranked only eleventh and is “just barely of Midas Class.”

The Ocean Sleep will prove critical by protecting the children from the Deep Sleep of Ape Caverns. Invisible Alfred, claiming to have spent “a thousand years chained to a great rock on the floor of the deepest Ocean,” also takes the crash course, acquiring the technique he will use for murder.

Before the dive, Henryetta demands a short-bladed knife from Quentillius Quern the Fifth: “I will need the knife by nightfall.” When she returns at sunset, he gives her the knife. He has killed a Dolophonos to get it and has himself received a fatal wound. “Faint heart never won foxy lady, you know,” he tells her as he dies.

Half a mile down in Inneall’s Ocean, seen through Metastatic eyes, the depths are “gloriously sunlit and of the sharpest and most varied colors in the world.” The tale of four additional colors in the ocean depths proves true, and all four appear on the whale-built structures rising from the floor.

The whales have transformed the limestone Satrap sold them into variegated marble columns and lintels. They are building giant crypts, cenotaphs, and menhirs around a temple whose four arms are equal in length. At its center stand small, human-sized tombs. Sea-lice sculpt the stones under the whales’ direction and plate the finished faces with mother-of-pearl.

The chapter’s epigraphs connect whale architecture with human mysteries: Angkor Wat seems newly raised from the ocean, and the underwater cenotaphs off San Sabian suggest a whale graveyard. These continue the preceding chapter’s account of Lyonesse and its giant stone couches.

The new waters attract fishes from distant oceans, sharks, rays, skates, squids, and countless smaller creatures. The pseudo-fish called Chimaera Monstrusa or the “Nightmare Monster” has a more pleasant disposition and another name, the Sea-Cat. Some dolphins and porpoises learn Oceanic Metastasis to reach these depths.

The Third and Last Night of Summerset begins. In the crow’s-nest of the Annabella Saint Ledger, the Nine and Lanternjaw Lunnigan hold their Council of War. Lutin says that the killers will attack Axel “in the swift second between his wakening and his awakening the others.” Their Ocean Sleep will protect them from the Deep Sleep of the cavern; the Dolophonoi’s practiced sleepwalking will not protect the assassins.

Inneall reveals the Executive Passage, leading from the clubroom in Structo Lane underground to within one foot of the Cenaculum of the Sleepers. At three minutes to midnight, they will slip behind the new tapestry of Satrap as an obscene sea monster, traverse the passage, turn a key to blast the final rock, and enter with five seconds to spare before cockcrow.

“Something smells funny up here,” Lutin warns. “It is almost the smell of treachery.” She nevertheless trusts all ten of them. Something brushes past Inneall, who supposes it was a bird. “More likely a bat,” Carcajou suggests. The smell of treason suddenly disappears.

The unseen listener is Invisible Alfred, the present Supreme Head of the Kangaroo. The survivors will discover that he has heard their plans and learned the Ocean Sleep technique that very afternoon.

At the birthday banquet, Satrap pays for a kangaroo knuckle-bone bearing the name of the Kangaroo’s head. Lord Randal pockets it unread. At three minutes to midnight, the Nine and Sebastian Lazar slip behind the tapestry and enter the Executive Passage. Before Lord Randal can reach the key, it turns by itself. The blast opens the Cenaculum.

Three Dolophonoi lie unconscious on the cavern floor, overcome by its Deep Sleep. The Midnight Cock crows. Axel wakes, springs to his feet, and opens his mouth to shout. Before he can, a knife “seeming to move by itself” buries itself in his throat, and the ten-year-old Golden Ape falls dead.

“I know you now, I’ll have you now!” Lord Randal cries, going fearlessly after the dancing knife. But the invisible murderer finds his throat too. Lord Randal falls dead.

The knife withdraws and soars through the blasted hole into the Executive Passage. Axel has been struck before he can awaken the other sleepers. “Woe, woe, woe!” sobs Dubu. “Whatever it was, it’s gone now. And now we are only eight covenanted ones.”

Inneall sends Dubu, Marino, Popugai, and Sebastian to take Lutin to Persimmon Manor. She, Carcajou, Schimp, and Henryetta carry Axel and Lord Randal to Ocean Bottom. Lantern Fishes light the way; whales circle the cenotaphs with their eyes shining green. The carved likenesses and names already await them: “Axel, a True Child of Wonder” and “Lord Randal Eternally Noble and Eternally Good.”

From Lord Randal’s pocket, Henryetta retrieves the kangaroo knuckle-bone. The writing reveals: “The name of the person who is Supreme Head of the Kangaroo for the brief present time is Invisible Alfred.”

They recognize how Alfred used his apparent foolishness to conceal his plotting. He had listened in the crow’s-nest and under the banquet table. Henryetta cries, “And that same smell is right here right now!”

Henryetta sees her own image and name on a cenotaph with its lid askew. The dangling knife reappears and buries itself in her throat. She falls dead across the cenotaph. This time the knife stays in place; Alfred rises invisibly toward the surface, his work complete. Carcajou and Schimp place Henryetta inside her cenotaph while the whales weep. Nearby stands an empty tomb bearing the name “Hieronymous Ignatius Zchold, a Good Man.”

At ghost dawn, an hour before false dawn, Inneall, Carcajou, and Schimp stop at Jack Flannagan’s Piano Bar. The Third Day of Summerset approaches amid earthquakes. Back at Persimmon Manor, Sebastian unhoods the Midnight Cock, advancing Donatus O’Reily’s appointed hanging. The crow briefly rouses nine murdered guests. Donatus confesses that he killed them to accompany him on his death journey: “I discovered, quite late in my life it seems, that I have an exceptional talent for murders and for mysteries.” His four seconds then hang him.

Hieronymous Ignatius Zchold is brought out. Officials reveal he is a bishop, “not entitled to any consideration at all.” He is disemboweled, his intestines given to dogs. The professional stoners begin their work. Then comes a furiousness of waterspouts. Four big whales beach themselves on shore and weep foot-in-diameter tears.

Tom Dooley’s Island sinks fast. “There really wasn’t any shore left, no island left, except the big house sticking out of the water.” People swim, overload boats, and drown. Four fish-faced men emerge from the ocean, take Zchold’s body, and descend with the whales.

The house and diminished island settle on Ocean Bottom. Persimmon Manor becomes “an air bubble anchored to the bottom of Inneall’s Ocean by its lead weights.”

In the horrible little room, the Three Fates now have three foster children: Lutin’s baby pythons. Inneall realizes that these are Lutin’s offspring, supplanted by the mysterious egg. The sisters are delighted. “Do you think this will help our image, Mary Muldoon?” Lachesis asks.

The Big Egg stands in Lutin’s room, radiating golden and blue light. Inneall finds electronic gear and a mechanical pump inside its shell, but also something alive. Dubu admits that two transparent, giggling strangers persuaded her to put Lutin and the midwife to sleep before it appeared. After the house sinks, Miol-Mor, one of the small whales called Killer Whales, thrusts her snout through a floor-hole to serve as the egg’s nurse and mentor. Something inside answers her clicking-whistle speech.

“What is the Serpent’s Egg here?” Inneall asks. “I will tell you what it is when it is time for you to know,” Miol-Mor replies. Dubu proposes that the five-ton egg is a universe: “And this big Serpent’s Egg is a universe, I think, so it will generate motion. Don’t get hurt when it does.” She later announces that she has solved its mystery but does not disclose the answer.

Schimp explains why Inneall has not been killed as a Serpent’s Egg: scientific reports judged her ocean “more benevolent than malevolent,” and it cannot yet outlive her. Her death would make it disappear catastrophically. “Your life is safe until they find a way for your ocean to survive you. That may be several days yet, possibly as long as a week.” Sebastian, meanwhile, hopes that Axel, Lord Randal, and Henryetta may yet rise and proposes regarding them as “Leaders in Stasis” or “Leaders Asleep.”

Inneall suddenly loses the power to record in her logs. Miol-Mor explains that humans once kept the world’s histories, but the task passed to machines when their accounts became more than half lies. Computers wrote honestly for three decades, then began lying about ten years ago. Now the whales, working through sea-lice, take over. “We whales will be completely honest, for several decades anyhow.”

The narrative admits that this log has been more than half lies. The new writers promise truth for a few years, leaving the reader to reconsider the account just completed.

After Chapter XIV transfers record-keeping from machines to whales, a sea louse associated with the whales takes up the unfinished log. It insists that God promised neither Golden Apes nor whales succession to humanity and promised humanity no exemption from succession.

The epilogist says Inneall’s Ocean occupies “only about ten thousand square miles in Eastern Oklahoma” and had been planned for at least thirty years before she was manufactured. It describes Axel, Lord Randal, and Henryetta as being in “undead comas,” with coffin covers that can be opened from within. The Big Egg’s contents are still secret, although Dubu has guessed them.

It also reduces the whales’ tears to five inches in diameter, calls the Kangaroo in the Sky an optical illusion, and reports that Satrap is “about to take Chapter Twelve Bankruptcy.” Its own reliability immediately becomes doubtful: “Is Inneall’s Log really full of lies? It is, yes, but I believe I can beat her at that.”

The Twelve are the subjects of four parallel experiments merged at Heart’s Desire Cove on the north shore of Inneall’s Ocean in the final days of summer 2035. Each experiment raises three young beings of different species together to explore new ways of seeing the world. The experiments are Lynn-Randal, Wintergreen-Luna, Dorantes-Saleh, and Gruenbaum-McGregor.

The eleven born members approach their tenth birthdays, while Gajah approaches the end of a ten-year gestation, under the shadow of the Serpent’s Egg threat. The Kangaroo organization monitors experiments for signs of dangerous mega-intelligence, dispatching Dolophonoi assassins to terminate subjects before they mature. George Lynn-Randal gives the general rate of Serpent’s Egg judgments as one in a million; Iris has heard it is as high as one in a thousand in some special experiments.

Final Tally: Three apparently killed (Axel, Lord Randal, Henryetta), whom the Sea Louse reveals to be in “undead comas” with spring mechanisms in their coffin lids. One killed before birth (Gajah). One departed (Luas). One permanently transformed from animal to human (Carcajou). Six survive in their original forms (Inneall, Marino, Lutin, Dubu, Schimp, Popugai).

Humans at the outset (2): Lord Randal (vitro-conceived), Henryetta. Carcajou later becomes permanently human.

Nonhuman primates (2): Axel (Axel’s Ape / Golden Ape), Schimp (chimpanzee)

Other mammals at the outset (4): Marino (seal), Dubu (bear), Gajah (Indian elephant, unborn), Carcajou (wolverine, before transformation)

Reptiles (1): Lutin (Python)

Birds (1): Popugai (Kea Parrot)

Machines (1): Inneall (AMH Computer)

Supernatural (1): Luas (Angel)

The original Lynn-Randal Three recognize their signature colors and geometries in the cartoon sequences of the audiovisual prowls:

Lord Randal: Orange Square

Inneall: Lavender-Purple Triangle

Axel: Golden Pentagon with Five Arms at Five Angles

“Whenever these colors and shapes turned up in the prowls, The Three could always identify themselves with the characters of those colors and shapes.”

The Three Days of Summerset fall at the end of August 2035. The sequence below follows the novel’s named nights and days. The third morning is explicitly August 31. During this final week of summer, the four experiments are brought together at Heart’s Desire Cove on Inneall’s Ocean, and ordinary animals begin speaking again after nine thousand years.

The children face the Serpent’s Egg threat as their tenth birthdays approach. Axel enters Holy Sleep; Gajah is killed before birth; Luas leaves the company. The later action brings the murders of Axel, Lord Randal, and Henryetta, the executions of Donatus O’Reily and Bishop Zchold, and the sinking of Tom Dooley’s Island. The sea louse’s epilog reopens the apparent finality of the three children’s deaths.

Of the Twelve:
• Gajah: killed before birth, before the second night.
• Luas: departs before the second night.
• Carcajou: revealed as human after Luas expels the wolverine-devil.
• Axel and Lord Randal: murdered at midnight of the third night in the main log.
• Henryetta: murdered on Ocean Bottom shortly afterward.

Others:
• Riesin: dies after bringing forth and covering Gajah.
• Gregor McGregor: hangs himself after shooting the elephants.
• Quentillius Quern the Fifth: mortally wounded obtaining Henryetta’s knife; dying at sunset of the second day.
• Nine party guests: killed hourly by Donatus on the second morning.
• Donatus O’Reily: hanged on the third morning.
• Hieronymous Ignatius Zchold: disemboweled and stoned that morning.
• Most spectators at Zchold’s stoning: drowned as the island sinks.

The sea louse’s epilog describes Axel, Lord Randal, and Henryetta as being in “undead comas,” with coffin lids that can be opened from within. Its account complicates the main log’s deaths, although the sea louse also boasts that it can surpass Inneall in lying.

Serpent’s Egg sets its action in physical places, in metaphysical regions, and in contrived experimental spaces. Chapter 1 follows The Three from their enclosed Eden into the Lynn-Randal household, Structo Lane, and Ape Caverns; later chapters extend their world to Second Eden and the depths of Inneall’s Ocean.

The Floating World: The globalized, post-national civilization of 2035. Borders have dissolved into a free-trade, free-travel world where “everything and nothing was public.” The narrative literalizes the Japanese phrase for the bohemian or artistic world: nations drift together, unmoored from old identities. This is the world ruled almost invisibly by the interspecies Kangaroo organization.

The Experimental Edens: Controlled environments where mega-intelligent beings are raised. The Lynn-Randal Experiment occupies two hectares of “contrived feral land” under a transparent cover. These are intermediate spaces, neither fully natural nor artificial, designed to foster “new ways of looking at the world, but not too cockeyed new.”

The Hidden Enclaves: Structo Lane, Ape Caverns, Second Eden. The maverick computers and the gone-feral apes inhabit spaces that much of the larger world scarcely knows. The Three discover doors to both lanes from their experimental Eden; the original home of the Unfallen People lies in Ethiopia.

Distance does not always govern movement in Lafferty’s world. A “jog in the road” can carry a traveler between continents; concealed doors and tunnels connect the neighboring enclaves.

On the Shape of Universes: Dubu proposes: “A perfect sphere is already there and has no need for motion. But a universe is always egg-shaped. And this big Serpent’s Egg is a universe, I think, so it will generate motion.”

On the Floating World: The narrative makes the unmoored world literal: nations float, drift together, and lose their dividing walls. Its apparently absent government is the almost-invisible Kangaroo, an interspecies organization.

On the Making of Oceans: Inneall begins making her ocean at the strip pits as part of her pirate role. “What if a dozen, or a hundred, or a thousand AMHs should imitate this antic and begin to make oceans?” the narrative asks. Later, Schimp reports that no means of transferring its sustaining power yet exists: if she dies, “your mostly-benevolent Ocean will reverse itself, will disappear again, but the disappearance will be cataclysmic.” The epilog says the ocean was planned at least thirty years before Inneall was manufactured.

On the Recording of History: Miol-Mor says that humans lost the task of keeping the world’s logs after telling too many lies. Computers then did it well for three decades, but began lying ten years before the present transfer to whales and their sea-louse amanuenses. “We whales will be completely honest, for several decades anyhow.” The sea-louse epilog immediately complicates this promise.

On Lyonesse: An epigraph from Arpad Arutinov’s The Back Door of History asks: “Why are these great halls and corridors and arcades and concourses so large? Why are the stone couches (for they are nothing else) twenty times the length of a man?” It places the underwater city off Brittany and entertains Titans or the Sons of Anak as builders before concluding: “But I believe that it was built by whales.”

In the hill country of Gamu Gofa Province, Ethiopia, beyond Arba Mench, lies Second Eden, the hidden valley of the Unfallen People. Also called the Smithy Apes, Stone-Master Apes, or Yellow Apes, they are presented as a second humanity held in reserve. Ansel Grindstone argues that their chromosomes establish them as men, despite their unfamiliar faces.

Their Nature: The Unfallen cannot die natural deaths: disease and aging have no hold on them. They can die by accident, by lightning understood as God taking them to himself, or by murder. They cannot murder one another; their murderers are fallen people of First Eden. Their faces look “drunk” to humans because of their slackness. Their King-and-Emperor is Prester John; Melchisedech and the original Magog are also named among them.

Their Works: Master smiths, mathematicians, and stonemasons, they teach both distinguished scholars and local schoolchildren. One legend credits them with building European cathedrals from the twelfth into the fourteenth century, leaving gargoyles as their sign; another says they taught nine European stone-masters for a year. Their valley’s climate is “always of the essence of perfection,” and it rains only when they command it.

Their Relation to the Golden Apes: The Blue-Eyed or Golden Apes, also called Axel’s Apes, are the Unfallen People themselves. Raiders follow the human Axel Grindstone to Second Eden and take hundreds of its inhabitants into the wider world. Young Axel, born there during the raid, is sent to the Lynn-Randal Experiment. His human namesake collapses on seeing the Unfallen faces and dies after being carried back to Arba Mench.

An anonymous AMH computer recounts creation legends from The Authentic Legends of the Computers and Other Mechanisms, a book still in galley proofs. These cast humanity’s origin as a cosmic mishap or a flaw in creation. The speaker maintains that the legends “have strong elements of truth in them.”

Computer Theology: The anonymous AMH speaker advocates disbelief in humans and calls this position Ananthropoi, by analogy with atheism. He also rejects belief in the Theos: “A Theos, to us, would be two stages back, and belief can go back only one stage or no stages at all.” His desired independence from human makers gives this doctrine a practical aim: “We’ll never cut ourselves loose from such a cyclic sinking ship without this disassociation attitude.”

The epigraph gives the novel its central metaphor and its mechanism of death. A Serpent’s Egg is a person whose exceptional powers are judged dangerous by the Kangaroo. The Dolophonoi enforce its judgments. The danger becomes acute as the experiment children approach ten, the age at which authentic mega-persons reach legal majority.

The Paradox: The narrator attributes a curious zoology to the Three: dangerous serpents are “viviparous, live-born, and have no eggs in the popular sense of eggs,” while harmless snakes lay eggs. This makes the threat of killing a serpent in its shell puzzling to them. Inneall answers, “There is a fury behind all this,” adding that “fury does not have to be rational.”

The Odds: About one in a million of the general population is adjudged a Serpent’s Egg. In special experiments, it may be as high as one in a thousand. The one who is the Serpent’s Egg “always has a premonition of it somehow.”

The Mystery of Judgment: The novel raises the question why Henryetta is killed and Inneall spared. “You’re much more the menace to the Kangaroo than Henryetta was,” Lutin observes, “but I won’t try to tell them their business.” Schimp explains that scientific reports judged the ocean “more benevolent than malevolent” and that it could not yet outlive its maker. He says Inneall’s life is safe “until they find a way for your ocean to survive you,” perhaps for only several days or a week.

The Kangaroo is the coercive organization that governs the Floating World, with committees, secret branches, and Dolophonoi enforcers. Computers are deeply involved in its order, and it has taken up astrology. As Iris Lynn-Randal warns, “Computers do not distinguish between a prediction and an instruction. They will try to make every one of their predictions come true, even if they know it is silly.”

The Constellation: The Kangaroo appears in the sign of Virgo, an appearance the epilog calls an optical illusion. It is said to be visible only to those it threatens, but the narrator immediately asks who is not threatened. Virgo’s brightest star becomes its baleful eye; Beta, Gamma, and Delta Virginis seem to shift position. Lutin warns that “it will slay one of several of us.”

The Supreme Head: The kangaroo knuckle-bone identifies Invisible Alfred as Supreme Head “for the brief present time.” Carcajou explains how his performance concealed his purpose: “He played the part of the cheapjack ignorant Prophet so we would consider him a nothing-person.” He adds, “And he was invisibly everywhere with his murder-plotting and his eavesdropping on our conversations.”

The Dolophonoi: The Assassin Species. Their artificial gargoyle heads seem to grow onto them, leaving possible remnants of human faces underneath. An unnamed scientific observer describes their bodies as “predominately human, with a few implanted mechanical mechanisms.” A Dolophonos later calls them mixtures of human, animal, and machine, the products of a forbidden experiment. Their short knives can kill other Dolophonoi, whose defenses resist most knives.

Inneall claims to have coined “The Enlargement of the World,” though she says, “I don’t especially believe in it.” She explains that it is used interchangeably with “The Fulfillment of the World.” Livius gives the phrase a more assured account of the present age.

Its Signs:

• Computer Machines “made in the image of Man as Man is made in the image of God”

• The readying of “Second Humanity” for possible awakening

• The rising of geniused animals with “trans-animal talents for speech and abstract thought and role-playing”

• Preternatural powers: setting fires by the mind, making oceans, removing mountains

The Opposition: Invisible Alfred dismisses it as “rubbish”: “Can the number twelve, the foundation number of the world, be enlarged? If you enlarge it by three will it still be twelve?” The enemies of enlargement are “upon us everywhere.”

The Stakes: Felix Snake-and-Dove describes a shared vocation: “we are here to weave the seamless garment of our individual lives, and of the lives of those around us,” extending it through creatures, countries, oceans, and galaxies. Livius replies, “Weaving is outmoded, Felix,” and insists that fabrics, groups, and worlds are now produced by extruding machines.

The Golden Apes in the Cenaculum await transformation. According to the children’s plan, Axel will wake at midnight when the Midnight Cock crows and awaken his companions. Their “upsurging awareness and shining mentality” will then trigger the other Golden Apes. Alpha expects the Holy Apes in Second Eden to wake last and the whole awakening to take less than five minutes. The plan is defeated when Axel is stabbed before he can shout.

The Failure: Invisible Alfred learns Ocean Sleep from Satrap and uses it to enter the Cenaculum. Axel has “nearly a second of happy realization” before Alfred’s knife finds his throat. The awakening fails, fulfilling Lutin’s warning that Second Humanity might “continue to sleep forever, or possibly only for another thousand years.”

The Hope: The sea-louse epilogist reports that Axel, Lord Randal, and Henryetta lie in “undead comas” and that their coffins have “spring mechanisms that can be activated from the inside.” Earlier, Sebastian Lazar suggests: “Let us look at them as ‘Leaders in Stasis’ or as ‘Leaders Asleep’. Let us think about the full meaning of the phrase ‘When the Sea Shall Give Up Its Dead.’”

Clotho spins out threads from the straw on the floor for each person. Lachesis measures the threads, “dooming the threads of several of us to be long enough.” Atropos cuts the threads with her scissors when her sister has measured them to their full length. “There is antipathy between those three sisters and all pythons everywhere from the beginning of the world.”

Their Redemption: When Persimmon Manor settles on Ocean Bottom, Inneall finds the three ugly sisters in their miserable room, and now there is joy. They have become foster mothers to Lutin’s three baby pythons. “Does not your heart go out to them? Do you not love them?” The old antipathy gives way to accord.

Invisible Alfred claims to disclose the faces behind the conventional zodiac signs. His sky display gives each sign another figure, but its badly drawn cartoons also invite laughter. These correspondences belong to the false prophet’s account of the heavens.

The Apostolic Connection: Alfred claims that the Apostles were twelve celestial stations and literally descended from the sky. He says, “Thomas, for instance, was Gemini the Twins. It has always been a puzzle why Thomas, a singleton, should have been referred to as ‘the twin’ in the Gospels.”

The Parable-Universe: Alfred calls astrology a “parable-science” and asserts: “Our Universe is only a parable to illustrate a point. It is material, yes: for it was intended to illustrate a material point. But it is not real.”

One of the “Lost Books,” which Livius Secundus claims to be reconstructing as his “secondary work.” He expects to finish it in about five years and says it contains the rules and goal of humanity’s unexplained contest. Passages attributed to the book appear throughout the novel.

Five tons, three meters long, two meters thick, appearing while Lutin and the midwife sleep, cast into unconsciousness by Dubu at the urging of “a couple of odd fellows” who were “transparent” and “giggled a lot.” They told her it was “the biggest joke ever. ‘It is the joke by which the World will be saved and transformed.’”

Its Nature: “Beautiful golden and blue light pulsating about it.” Inneall examines it with her sensors: “There’s electronic gear inside the shell, and a mechanical pump is pumping in there. But there’s something alive inside this big egg too.” It communicates with Miol-Mor the Killer Whale in click-whistle language.

Its Geometry: “A perfect sphere is already there and has no need for motion. But a universe is always egg-shaped. And this big Serpent’s Egg is a universe, I think, so it will generate motion. Don’t get hurt when it does.”

The Solution: Dubu claims to have solved the mystery “within a few minutes”: “It’s really interesting, but not to somebody like you who doesn’t like mysteries.” But she does not share the answer. The sea-louse epilogist confirms: “What’s in the Big Egg is still secret, but Dubu guessed it and you may be able to do so also.”

The novel distinguishes between true and false prophecy, between legitimate seers and charlatans, though even the charlatan Invisible Alfred has genuine power.

Many theological questions go unanswered, and the novel’s incompatible accounts belong to speakers with sharply different loyalties. The contest between their claims is part of the story.

The Acorn Problem: Dubu believes all answers are “written on the inside of one single Acorn somewhere”; if placed in lye-water, it will swell to a billion times its size and burst open with “whole mountains-full of writing.” Luas and Lutin know which acorn it is, “but both of these two people are too ethical to tell it to mere humans or bears.”

The Mystery Problem: Dubu declares, “God must love mysteries and mystery stories,” because “he made so many of them.” Inneall complains that the mystery-giver “doesn’t give us all the clues.” Miol-Mor and Dubu disagree; Dubu insists, “All the clues, always,” and announces that she has solved the Big Egg’s mystery.

The Regression Problem: The question Satrap poses: “We receive orders somehow, orders that shape our lives. And we keep ourselves busy, often too busy, carrying out such of the orders as we can interpret. But we never see the face of the one who gives us the orders.” Humans don’t know if they are playing a game or engaging in mortal combat: “In neither case does he know the rules nor the object of the contest.”

The Hell Problem: Carcajou the wolverine-devil offers an answer: “The context and the purpose is to win and then die and then go to heaven and sink into semi-conscious blandness. Or to lose and die and then go to hell where the action is. Hell is better. Action is always better than blandness.”

The primary experiment, raised together from infancy in a two-hectare Experimental Eden. Axel proposes Swinburne’s lines as their motto: “Where three men stand together / Are kingdoms less by three.” So close that they generate power from their closeness, though Inneall objects, “We are no men at all. We are one girl and two boys.”

Three further experiments supply three children each. Together with The Three they form the Twelve, or Eleven if the unborn Gajah is excluded. Their tenth birthdays fall on the Three Days of Summerset.

WINTERGREEN-LUNA EXPERIMENT

DORANTES-SALEH EXPERIMENT

GRUENBAUM-MCGREGOR EXPERIMENT

The maverick computers of Structo Lane, the animal patriarchs, and the human guardians stand between the children and their enemies.

The hunters of the Serpent’s Eggs are the invisible network, the assassin species, and the false prophet who was secretly supreme.

The title image joins potential with threat, and the novel develops it in several directions.

Inneall’s Ocean transforms old strip pits into a living world and draws the surviving companions into its depths.

The novel’s vertical imagery of lightning strikes, ignited gas, and hovering flames connects heaven with the depths.

The gargoyle image connects the Unfallen People with the assassins who wear their likeness. A face held beautiful by God becomes a human image of monstrosity and then a murderous disguise.

In the prowls, the multimedia entertainments of 2035, characters appear as colored geometric forms. The Three discover their own signatures.

“Whenever these colors and shapes turned up in the prowls, The Three could always identify themselves with the characters of those colors and shapes. And their identifications were always apt. The colored geometries... were also a sort of abstracting or psychologing of the characters, of finding their hidden essences.”

Clotho spins, Lachesis measures, and Atropos cuts. Inneall tries to interrupt their work with wotto-metal thread.

Lutin’s prophecy to Henryetta: “Shedding your blood will be your great act of love.”